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Our subscription packages are designed to help you add value to your existing Sustainable Agriculture resources. Your subscription not only helps us keep the project on its feet, it also helps the movement toward a more sustainable and healthy agricultural system become a reality.

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NCAT strives to make our information available to everyone who needs it. If you are a limited-access or low-income farmer and find that one of our publications is just not in your budget, please call 800-346-9140.

Energy Co-ops and Local Ownership

Cooperatives are businesses owned and managed by the people who use them. There are tens of thousands of cooperative businesses in the United States, managing a wide variety of goods and services, including electricity, insurance, credit, housing, and agriculture.

Wind energy cooperatives enable farmers to pool their resources, meeting the startup capital costs associated with wind turbine installations. Cooperatively-owned biodiesel and ethanol plants offer other benefits too: They tend to increase local prices for soybeans (in the case of biodiesel) and corn (in the case of ethanol). Grower-owners can sell their own commodities to the plant, and are eligible to receive annual dividends. Moreover, biofuel plants provide a hedge against volatile commodity prices. When corn or soy prices drop, so too do the production costs of ethanol or biodiesel, increasing the potential profits from biofuel production.

In short, energy cooperatives allow rural communities to control and profit from their own agricultural resources.

Success Stories

Adding Value the Minnesota Farmersí Way
This paper aims to find the economic impact of New Generation Cooperatives (NGCs) and hybrid forms
of these structures, and their value-added processes, on farm income that in turn impacts local economic
development.

ATTRA - A National Sustainable Agriculture Assistance Program - is developed and managed by the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT).
Visit the NCAT website for more information on our other sustainable agriculture and energy projects.